The Highwire with Del Bigtree - DETRANSITIONING: LUKA’S STORY

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Del sits down with Luka, an advocate for protecting kids from gender medicine, who herself medically transitioned as a teen before transitioning back to a female. Hear her trying journey telling of how the medical and trans communities have turned their backs on her.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

There's a lot going on in this discussion around gender and gender identity. This is just a taste of how the media is covering this in so many different ways. Take a look at this. Kean was born Caitlin, but from his earliest memories, he felt trapped in the wrong body, living the wrong life. When Betty Thomas was seven years old, this children's book sparked a conversation about gender. There was finally a breakthrough in those... like three years of just complete anger and sorrow.

More and more young people are emerging as transgender. Under that, that's a whole umbrella of gender identities where people might have pronouns that change day to day. There might be people who have one set of pronouns for the rest of their life. Taking away kids' agency and the right to their own body is, it's just, it's anti-human. It typically began in early childhood.

It just two to four. Little boys insisting no mommy I'm not a boy. I'm a girl When a two-year-old comes up to you and says mommy when is the good fairy going to come with her magic wand and change my penis into a vagina? You're like okay this is not typical this is not something a normal child would do. I didn't go to medical school my wife didn't go to medical school So we trust them and we trust that they know what's best for our kids. We're only trying to follow what our medical community says are the best choices you can make as a parent. I'd rather have a living son than a dead daughter.

But what age does the medical transition begin with medication? So medical affirmation begins when the patient says they're ready for it. So that could be a kiddo who is just starting puberty and panicking because they're getting breast buds or their penises getting bigger and busier and they're worried about all kinds of masculine changes. It's also exceedingly rare, typically afflicting roughly 0.01% of the population, the majority of whom would have naturally outgrown it on their own and historically did.

Others became what we used to call transsexual adults. He just now started hormone blockers. It's an implant. It is to prevent his puberty. This is an off-label, untested experimental use. It hasn't been through any FDA approval process. It's what I would call a chemical conversion therapy. The development of desire is mediated by the sex steroid hormones.

And if you've blocked them, then you've also blocked that development. Children actually reported greater self-harm with this medication. Girls exhibited more behavioral and emotional problems, greater dissatisfaction with their bodies. If you give them to a girl who's already started her periods, you're going to put her into an immediate, sort of violent menopause. Transgender surgeries across the country are on the rise, as more insurance companies are offering coverage for those procedures, and it's not just adults interested in the procedure.

Ursula Perry shows us a growing number of teenagers are as well. Now 17, he's had hormone therapy and had his breasts and uterus removed. Kean is part of a spike in demand for transitioning from teens around the world. Today I am having top surgery. It's really, really hard to look in the mirror and see something that doesn't conform to how your brain or how you think you are. A young woman alleges she was coerced in a treatment at the age of 15 that caused permanent mutilation and damage to her body. When I was 15 years old, I had a double mastectomy. They removed both in my breasts. I'm 18 years old now and I'm...

And quite frankly, I am devastated with what has happened to me. Such a serious process to go down and it's so experimental because, you know, doctors don't even know the outcomes of a lot of these treatments that are given out. I should have been, you know, told to wait and not affirmed in my gender identity I was claiming to have and, yeah, just given intensive therapy basically to investigate the feelings that I was having to try and, you know, figure out how I got. got to that stage. Parents are not happy with the Rockland Charter School Academy for having transgender discussions in a kindergarten class. Why are we doing this? Shouldn't the schools be focused on science

and education and learning and reading and writing and instead they're being taught, are you a boy, are you a girl? And they're confusing the children. People are girls. Some are boys. Some are both. Some are neither. Gender is all about how we feel on the inside and how we express ourselves. We're telling children when they haven't fully developed, that all you have to do is medically transition, and you fit in. I was one of those kids. It got me at 42.

Your child doesn't have a chance. Planned Parenthood gives out testosterone on a first visit. Depending on the state, it absolutely gives testosterone to minors. They gave you testosterone immediately. Yeah, I essentially just made a phone call and said, I want, I want to transition. And it was immediately given. Did they do any psychological testing? Did they ask you why? What was your motive? It was completely self-diagnosed. Some of it's a social contagion. In other ways, it's iatrogenic, which means that it's actually

caused by the medical profession. So you start to get doctors and others misdiagnosing people. This was what happens with anorexia and bulimia. You know, these doctors identify eating disorders, and then they publicize them, and it gets all this publicity about it, and then the disorder spread. Well, then there's all these gender-affirming care clinics that pop up, and they're enormously profitable, which is terrifying. Right. That they have a same as Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex, they have a vested interest in going to the war. These people have an interest in diagnosing people with gender dysphoria.

If you confuse people about a fundamental element of their identity, then they're, Those who are already so confused, they're barely hanging on, are going to fall prey to that and all hell's going to break loose. And that's exactly what's happened in the trans situation. Can you find it in a blood test? Can you do testings of genetics? Or can you do a brain image and find the gender identity in there? You cannot. There is no objective test to diagnosis.

Yet we're giving very harmful therapies on the basis of no objective diagnosis. As someone who has gone through the process, I think I can sufficiently say I don't want any children going through that process. It's incredibly turbulent. I guess that's the best word. It's a lot to go through physically, mentally, emotionally. I don't know what kind of world we're living in where it's now become people who don't want that to happen are the abusers and are the ones that are in the wrong. It is the fact that they are mutilating and literally castrating physically and chemically, minding. in the name of this false ideology.

They go right to puberty blockers, right to cross-sex hormones, and they are sterile. Not only that, no orgasms for them in their future. Nice. Is that informed consent for a 14-year-old who's going through body issues? Men cannot become women. Women cannot become men.

Biological sex is real. Obviously, a lot of different opinions on this subject, but when we think about our nonprofit here, here, the informed consent action network, what is informed consent? What is a child really capable of giving consent or understanding what these conversations are about? And, you know, I think there could be plenty of conversations about, you know, is there something chemically that's happening in our environment? But today we're really looking at the social side of this, and I think that when you look at, look at this chart, this is the Gallup poll. Just when you think about the change in having these conversations with children, 7.2, 7.2,000, you think, percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBT. That's what most of us understood to be, you know,

the sort of the gay rights movement and their place in this world, which is, you know, they're, as I said before, I'm totally open and open to them walking with us. They're beautiful people. They're my brothers and sisters. But look what's happened. Look at, you know, as the, you know, you look at the different generations, the millennials, it rises up to 11.2 percent of them identifying in this category. And now, you know, as the, you know, you look at the different generations, the millennials, it rises up to 11. Now Gen Z, 19.7, this is the latest generation born in 1997 to 2004, these teenagers now identify and God knows what's about to happen with these babies and children that are having these conversations in kindergarten first grade.

In order to try and get some understanding of this, because I mean, I'm sure I speak for many of you, it's so outside of a frame of reference that I have that we really want to wanted to get a personal story, someone that was involved and saw that they were having trouble as a teenager and listened to this sort of new thought system which says it's really all about your body, you're in the wrong body. This is the story of Luca. I grew up in the Midwest. I did ballet for the majority of my childhood.

I also did lots of different sports. Volleyball, soccer, trap shooting. I didn't ever really think about being a boy or girl when I was younger. I was mostly just focused on being a kid. Around junior high, so like end of seventh grade time, my parents had begun to like split up. The whole like changing houses each week thing

didn't work well for me mentally. Kind of made me revert into myself in terms of hanging out with people or wanting to go and do things. It was a lot of, at that point, spending time I'm on my phone outside of school, right around where I like really started to go through puberty, around like 13.

I was like finding myself like having crushes on like other girls in my class and also just feeling uncomfortable with my body at the time. And so I started to go through searching out like different groups for support, learning about like what the LGBT community was because I grew up sheltered in a way and didn't really know what that was, to looking more into it.

When I heard some of this, some of this stuff about like, like you don't like certain parts of your body like your chest or the fact you're like getting hips because you're going through puberty, then if you're uncomfortable with that, maybe you're just born in the wrong body and you're meant to be a boy. I definitely felt understood in a way just because it felt like it was saying all the right things to describe how I was feeling at the time. Being in more of these chat rooms and stuff, I started to open up about the fact that I was like, oh, well, I don't really like my chest or I don't like the fact I would got my period at that point.

And I was just feeling like generally uncomfortable with like growing up into a woman at the time. I had been like talking in these chatums for a couple of months at that point when it started to be people trying to like get me to contact them outside of that like group setting of the chat room. At first it was normally just, okay we're going to slowly like talk about this stuff. Um, talk about like sexual stuff and then from there it got to like oh can you send a picture of like one part of your body or another. They got to a point where I eventually did begin sending them naked pictures of myself. There was an aspect of like also threatening me if I did not continue with this, being like, I'm going to find you. I'll like to find your parents. I did at the time feel like if I did not continue, then something bad would happen to those around me.

At this point, I was severely depressed. I was having trouble getting up and going to school. I was just constantly anxious and like on edge. I did like end up harming myself using a knife on my thighs. A couple weeks after I had had issues with like the self-harming thing, my parents ended up seeing some of the messages and we're so concerned they did end up getting the police involved. When the police came over, they like, they took my phone, went through everything. I also ended up having to pretty much like strip in front of a female officer to look for any signs of abuse and self-harm. At that point they didn't take me into custody or anything.

spent pretty much the entire night just having a constant panic attack of like hyperventilating and not being able to breathe and like crying and like curling up in a ball in my bed. From that point, I ended up in outpatient hospitalization. Well as Luca tries to find, you know, comfort or understanding what's happening with her, of course, her parents were hanging in the balance, trying to figure out how to understand. And as the psychologist and medical establishment gets involved, Luca decides to make a very strong choice about her future. It was only a couple weeks or so into that first outpatient hospitalization that I ended up telling my parents that I was having issues regarding my body and that I thought I was transgender. They reacted in wanting to be supportive of me, but also at the time very, very afraid because they were told by like the therapist, doctor and the nurse, they're like, okay, if this is the issue,

that's going on, you need to like affirm this because would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son? I kind of tried just to downplay the fact I was female like I would wear the chest spinder and looser clothing and I had my hair cut at the time. Starting my sophomore at high school, send my teachers an email before class starts and be like, I would like you to call me by this name

and if you could use he him pronouns, I would appreciate it. That is when I started to go through high school as a boy. I first started hearing about top surgery Similar to chest binding, like in all the like online trans-spaces is one of the things that is talked about so much You also have a lot of people posting about it and being like or like making videos about it and being like okay, well, I got this done and look how like I feel great after this this is euphoric. I feel amazing And so as someone who was uncomfortable with their breasts and was wearing a binder at this point like consistently almost like eight hours a day or more I was like, maybe this will help. And I had talked about it with my therapist at this point a little bit.

And from there, she was like, yeah, we could get you into someone in your city that can do this. My therapist had, like, sessions where I was not there and it was just my parents. They thought that, like, okay, well, this is, this must be, like, an established, like, treatment plan in the medical, like, medical world if they're saying that this is okay. We don't want our kid to like kill themselves, so we're gonna be supportive. So it was during the summer of 2018 in July is when I was 16 years old and I had top surgery or double mastectomy. One thing that I noticed in me was just the complete like lack of feeling in my chest, which I I think it kind of definitely freaked me out at first. But I've been told so many times that this is going to help me that I believe it helped me.

The next step from there in the November of my junior year, I ended up starting cross-sex hormones or testosterone. As a result of taking testosterone, I went through male puberty, or the closest equivalent of male puberty that a female can have. My voice dropped, my skin got a very different texture, my hair got a different texture, my fat on my body redistributed. I grew an Adam's apple, body hair, just all that stuff. I kind of like having a lower voice, or I kind of like the fact that I got like a more defined jaw line. Because it was stuff that at the time, it was like, okay, well, this is helping me pass as male. The next, like, progressive step, I guess you could say,

in the transition that most people were going, was like, oh, get a hysterectomy. The doctor that I went to, like, at the gender clinic, she was very much for it. She was like, yeah, if you want this, yeah, we can get, we can do this. And she made it sound like the simplest surgery ever that there wasn't a lot of health impacts as long as you like left your ovaries. I mentioned it to my parents and they ended up talking with the doctor and being like, absolutely not. It's my honor and pleasure to introduce you to Luca now.

Luca, thank you for joining us today. Of course. And I want to thank you for being brave. This is such a sensitive and controversial issue, and you're sharing, you know, very intimate details that I think are important to this discussion, and it's a conversation we're not hearing a lot about. So I want to thank you for taking that time.

So let's just take it from that moment, the moment where your parents decide to, you know, just put their foot down. They've been going along with you, but the hysterectomy just went too far. What was that, what did that feel like for you at the time? I mean, I suppose at the time, it was a bit confusing in the sense of like,

well, we've gone along with everything else, what makes this different in a sense? Because, you know, like my doctor's, and my doctor's already saying, like, yeah, this is a step we can take. and then you have my parents putting their foot down. But looking back, I realized that they put their foot down because they actually had all of the information

about what this does to a body, especially because I was so young. Whereas they didn't have that for anything else, and they were relying on what they thought was well-established science with a lot of evidence. And as you talk about that well-established science, is that, I mean, are the psychologists that are speaking, are they very confident about what they're saying in this space? And do you have a sense of their background? Like, I mean, this feels like fairly new territory for psychologists. Are they representing it that way? It was never represented to me as if it was a new thing. It was represented to me. It was represented to me. me as if, oh, this is just like something we do. We have, you know, science to establish this.

They talk about it. Similarly, I suppose, when you hear someone who has a very strong belief that something will work, they talk about it like that, not like people who have mountains of evidence and, you know, well-planned out studies with high-house. quality evidence. They don't talk about it and from that perspective because people who actually care about the science behind it are also willing to accept that, you know, what we do have is very low quality and we need more and it will always be changing and we could be wrong. Whereas the professionals in support of this that I've heard speak or I've spoken with, they very much frame it more so in the sense of a belief that this will work.

Now you spoke about, you know, almost like a placebo effect in that having had, you know, the top surgery, you didn't really have much feeling, but you felt like, oh, this is supposed to solve my problems, so it must be. What was that feeling like? I've watched some of these videos. There is this allation to it. Did you feel an elation and how long did that last? I think for me it was less of feeling elated and a lot more of feeling like a pressure had lifted from my chest. And when you think about it, that is exactly what did happen. Because, you know, once I had the surgery, I didn't need to bind anymore. So it really did make it where, you know, if you're crushing your ribs for eight hours each day, of course it's going to feel like a weight was lifted when you no longer have to do that even, you know, if the surgery was never really necessary to accomplish that in the first place. Obviously you were young and part of this conversation is young people really involved in these conversations are having discussions about, you know, sex and what that means.

and it seems to be getting younger and younger, how much of this had to do with your attraction and did you imagine what future relationships would be with you as a man? Or was it more just about yourself? You know, was it more about partnership or was it more about yourself? I think at that age it was very much more about myself.

And, you know, I think it's probably like that for a lot of young people because I don't, you know, I don't think 16 year olds are exactly thinking that far ahead in terms of like, oh, what is my future long-term relationships going to be like? It's, it was very much, oh, if I sort myself out, then I can do with that later because I wasn't even in the mindset of processing what that would actually be like at the time. And in that process, as you were looking at hysterectomy, are there discussions of further, more dramatic surgeries? It was really going through the steps of like, this is what I'm supposed to do. And I hadn't gotten to that part where after the hysterectomy, any other surgeries were discussed.

But it very much did go down the line of like, okay, well, I have a flat chest. And so I think that, you know, the next thing for my transition would be, okay, we're going to start hormones. So you pass more as male. And then after that, it was like, okay, we've gotten used to that. We've kind of sent to it. What's next? Well, what's the next step? The next step is, well, it would be a hysterectomy.

So that way you don't get pregnant. Just stuff like that. When did you start to question the decisions that you'd made was, you know, did it happen? and slowly or did something trigger it when you started thinking maybe this isn't the right path for me um i would say the the first time i really questioned if this was right was right was very very briefly the thought popped into my head during the spring of my freshman year of college um so what which would have been last year um um um um where it really popped in my head of at the time I had gotten to the point where I was very tired of taking a pill every day in the form of the SSRI as I was on.

And so I decided that I really wanted to stop that and lean off of them and then really work on myself and be able to manage it without manage anything I was still dealing with at that point without medication. And, you know, as a part of that, of course, as I'm getting off this one medication, it did slip in my head of like, well, I don't want to be reliant on medication, but I still am taking hormones every week via injection. And then at that point, you know, end of the semester rolled around. I was still taking testosterone. I went to go work for the summer. So that's just so the whole like stopping it slipped to the back of my mind. And after the summer was over though, I, some things almost clicked and I just started thinking more about, well, what do I want my life to look like now?

What do I want for my future? What do I want for my future relationships? What do I want if I want children? And along with that, also realizing just how much I was taught. down to a medical industry because of the fact that I, you know, needed a pharmacy nearby to fill this prescription. I had to have the syringes in the sharps container and do make time for this injection every week, even though I at that point hated doing it because it just, it hurt and it

was not, you know, it wasn't making me feel better and at that it felt like it was tearing you apart. Can I ask you a question just about the SSRIs that you decided to start getting off of? And we've talked to, I've talked to lots of people for all the different reasons they're taking it. But did those start before you'd made this decision to transition? Or did they, were they added on to a part of the program after you made that decision? They were before. Throughout my teenage years, I had been on several different medications for depression, anxiety at various different doses. But it was before.

How did those make you feel? They really blunted out my emotions to the point where I really wasn't feeling anything. Like instead of having any highs or any lows, it was just like a baseline of I wasn't getting excited about things. I wasn't really feeling sad at that point. And, you know, I got to the point where I was like, anything I've gone through, I can't work through these if I don't feel some of those emotions and really, you know, figure out where they're coming from and how to help them. I got tired of just blunting everything out when I really wanted to work. work on it. And then it got to the point where, you know, around last year when I stopped, I realized there was so much that I was never even given a chance to work on because of how

blunting these were to my ability to even feel and process emotions. Would you have perhaps made a different choice in the idea of transitioning if you hadn't been on those drugs? I feel like maybe if I hadn't been on them, I would have at least been given a chance to maybe work through some of what I went through, at least emotionally, and really, you know, maybe benefit from therapy. But then again, it was almost solely focused on the transition thing anyway. So who knows? Just so I'm clear, you know, that really came from interactions with people online. It wasn't coming from, you know, your teachers inside your school or nurses. This was something you really found this community online that really started enrolling you in this thought that this was your issue.

Is that the correct representation? Yeah. It really took what at the time were, you know, both issues from being preyed upon, but then just also normal teenage insecurity. and really really kind of twisted them into this feeling of you're just a boy trapped in the wrong body or this is if you even think if you're even questioning if you're trans it means you're trans. And so, you know, there's obviously a lot of support when you were thinking about the idea

that you might be in the wrong body, you should transition. Is there support when you start moving the other direction, when you want to detransition, is there the same level of support that's available to you? No, absolutely not. There is barely any, aside from the few other people who are vocal about it, who will share their experiences for it, or small communities online that get frequently attacked for even talking about the subject.

it's you know medical professionals don't know what to do with you there's no larger really support groups for this it's a very very isolating feeling you know they they were so supportive going one way and then the minute you mentioned that you you made a mistake or you didn't want this or this didn't work all all of a sudden they don't really want much to do with you you you did some you started doing research, you started looking at what you'd been through, posting, we've talked about this drug, Lupron, which can get a puberty blocker, which wasn't something you did, but what happened when you started hosting, is anyone aware of the science around this and asking questions about what you were involved with? How were you treated when you did that? Yeah, I had posted something that just

went through, like, the side effects of LuPron and other places that has been used. and the problems that occurred when it was used. And I posted something about, you know, the Florida Board of Medicine doing a review of the evidence and something with the NHS. And I didn't really give my opinion on these either. I just posted them because I was like, oh, well, that's interesting. This is information.

You know, I thought people would want to have this information. And I got, you know, that's when, A few people were like, I can't talk to you anymore and told me that if you keep posting stuff like this, you are killing trans kids. Wow. And it was at that point that I was like, but that's not, this is just information and everyone deserves to have all of the information. and how is me merely posting the side effects of a medication actively being used, harming someone? And, you know, that was one of my moments where I was like,

I really don't understand why any questioning of this community is seen like that, because, you know, any place you're not allowed to ask questions should be seen as a very dangerous one. I agree. So how long ago did you decide then you back off of the SSRIs, you're getting off of those, and then the testosterone. How long ago did you stop taking the testosterone shots? I stopped taking testosterone in what would have been late September, early October. So it's been less than here still. Well, Luca allowed us to spend some time with her and discuss some of the issues that are going on through this phase of her life that is now referred to as detransitioning. This is what that is all about. Yeah, so since I've stopped tea, my acne has gone really bad. I've tried to use light concealer on it and that just made things worse.

So I just kind of have to leave it at this point. Um, along with that, just the general, like, even though I'm off tea, I still have, like, issues with, like, facial hair, um, body hair and just, obviously my voice is kind of stuck this way now that I'm off tea as well. So also from testosterone, even though I don't take it anymore, I developed an Adam's apple while I took it, and so that is kind of just there now. I can't do anything about it. The only option would be surgery, which I'm not wanting to look into at the moment.

It's been months since I have officially stopped taking tea. Nothing in my system had restarted yet to like make estrogen or anything like that. And so I was essentially going through like almost like menopause symptoms of like feeling nauseous, getting headaches. My joints still hurt even off of tea. Physically, it's just a lot of wait and see. Wait and see what will get better. Wait and see what will bounce back versus what we pretty much know is permanent.

I was like, I do kind of want a family someday. Have I ruined my chances of having biological children? biological children at 20 years old because of something I did as a teenager. Looking back, as I do regret getting the mastectomy. I take responsibility for my part in it, but I also can't be the only one. I was a teenager on like who had a history of mental health issues at this point and approached with the idea of like, hey, I want to cut this part of myself off to feel better. And the medical community went, yeah, okay. It became no, you you're born in the wrong body, there's something wrong with you,

and you need to be medicalized to fix this. Like, it was a certain, like, loss of innocence of childhood. You and I both know that we've been trying to figure out if you would be able to do this interview because you really aren't feeling very good at this time. Do you mind sharing with me, you know, sort of what's going on with your health as you're, you know, sort of going through this process?

Yeah. At the moment, and this has been an issue as I've gone off tea and it's getting progressively more apparent that there was damage done while I was on tea and it's like almost been slowly revealing itself the longer my body's off of it. But lately I've been having heart issues where it's just like it's chest pain. It's my heart is beating way too fast or feels like it's skipping at times. and it makes me feel like I might pass out. And when that happens, it really is a matter of just I need to lay down. And I'm almost out of commission for the day. Similarly, I still deal with joint pain.

And there are my days with that too where I'm just stuck in bed. I can't do much. What kind of doctor are you working with? Is this like something they do a lot of? They know what they're, do you feel like they know what they're doing? The only doctor I've been able to get into, to talk to her about this stuff, has been a doctor who essentially is the same kind that I went to when I was on teen. She is someone who specializes in transgender care. And while she's nice enough and has offered to help me, she doesn't really know how.

How she told me, you know, I really don't know what to do with you. There's no protocol for this, which is one of those things where that's not reassuring to hear from a medical professional that you came to because your body is falling apart. And in other terms of finding someone else, finding anyone else who's willing to kind of work through the damage done and actually help me has been incredibly hard. I would think that's very scary. I mean, just any health issue, we like to think that there's specialists that really know what they're doing here. And yet this is such a new thing. I guess you're, you know, you're, you know. I did tell my original physician back in January on a quick Zoom call with her that was supposed to be like my annual appointment.

And I told her everything that was going on about my, about how you know this was wrong. I didn't believe I could consent to this at the time about my joint pain. And she essentially told me that she was like, yeah, she'd probably see someone, but also that this was just, this was just part of my gender journey and took almost no care or responsibility in the fact that she was one of the people. that put me down this path. I mean, someone that you really put a lot of trust in took you, you know, really helped facilitate a very aggressive path for a child. And then the moment you really seek to have some understanding, they're just not there. What does that feel like?

It really does feel like a complete, like, sense of just, you've been abandoned by the medical community. They were, you know, the medical community was more than happy to put you down this path where you would have been reliant on them for life. And then, you know, when you come back to them and you tell them, well, I was just a kid. Why did you let, I need help? Why did you let me do this? Can you help me? It turns around into this pain you're going through is just part of your journey. and essentially not much help is given, if any. What has your relationship with your parents been recently?

I mean, obviously they tried to work through. They put their foot down on the hysterectomy, and now where are they at in all of this journey? It's still, of course, complicated, because this whole issue, of course, is complicated, but it's getting better. or having to tell, especially my mom about everything, probably one of the hardest and most heartbreaking things I ever had to do.

Because she was someone that did have, like, vocally had reservations about the mastectomy. And those were essentially quashed by everyone around her out of, you know, you can't speak up again about this you can't you have to affirm um and so having to you know call her and be like i you know i messed up and i i'm sorry you know i had to i had to tell her i'm so sorry you were right i should have i should have listened when you told me to wait or that i was too young or that someday you know maybe i want to have kids or want my body the way it was. But we're slowly

trying to work through everything. And I feel like in some ways it has you know brought us closer that specifically for her that she has her daughter back now. There's going to be a lot of parents watching, you know, or

are watching right now. And is, do you imagine is there anything your parents could have done your mom especially to move you in a different course or do you just feel like this whole thing is stacked against the parents and their ability to intervene? I feel like specifically with how the system is set up now where it is essentially affirmation only and parents who question it are they're shut down or they are emotionally blackmailed with the threat of suicide. when, you know, I've talked to a lot of parents who have taken a lot of different approaches

to how to handle these issues with their kids. And they all come from a place of love, no matter what, you know, path they take. But in terms of what could have really, you know, helped me, I think, you know, if my parents really would have maybe, you know, shut down the internet axis and really kind of, you know, if you're taking one thing away, replacing it with another. So if we're taking away the internet, replacing it with more, you know, like actual quality family time and just making sure I knew I was loved and supported and cared for how I was and that I didn't need surgery to change that or anything to change that.

And that, you know, puberty is uncomfortable, but you will make it through it. And I wish that the medical community would have, you know, given me therapy for the issues I actually needed to help with and helped me build the skills to get through those issues as opposed to affirming

what could almost be seen as like a disassociation or maladaptive. coping skill of reverting into this identity. So now you're obviously getting, you're getting very active. You're speaking out publicly. You are, you know, doing things like this. We're very appreciative of that. You know, there's a real push now and very sort of just right now with states,

school systems looking at, you know, even making these, you know, these, We're looking at third, fourth grades, you know, parents that are grappling with their child and secrecy rules where the parents aren't being told that the children being asked about their gender identities. You know, you were 16, which is still very young, when you think about, you know, nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds that are now being approached with this conversation, what are your thoughts? and about that?

I think kids should be kids, and they should be left out of this. You know, they deserve a safe environment where if a kid is having these struggles, that they can, you know, talk through with their parents or an actual professional that is trained, like medically from a adult, not a teacher, about what is going on. and be given a chance to grow up and most likely grow out of these feelings. But at that same time, when you are introducing these concepts to kids, where it very much feels like you are asking them to put themselves in a box, you are in a way killing off a portion of that magical, imaginative exploration that is childhood.

by asking these kids to label themselves, to have to put themselves in such a box, boxes which are often really defined on regressive gender stereotypes of, oh, if you like pink and, you know, you like pink and dolls, maybe you're just a girl. And if you, you know, if you're a tomboy, maybe you should be an actual boy. It really is, in a way, ending a sense of childhood innocence through the guise of being kind. And, you know, obviously parents also shouldn't be kept in the dark about this. I always find it funny that the same people that talk about, you know, if these children are at risk, you know, of either, you know, know, severe mental comorbidities or suicidal ideation, why you would almost break your duty

as a mandated reporter by keeping that a secret. I think, you know, families need to be involved. Regardless of, you know, really what a child's going through, having that supportive environment where the parents are active in their child's life is very important. And if a teacher is so afraid of a abuse happening at home, they shouldn't be keeping that a secret that way either. They need to go to the proper people to report that to so that can get sorted out. No matter what is happening between, you know, no matter what is going on, there should never be a situation where you have a teacher and a kid going, oh, don't or don't tell, just don't tell your parents, this is our secret.

that throws up so many red flags if that is happening, regardless of what that topic is. You, you know, I've seen you in some of these discussions really getting pushed back from the transgender community, you know, about this idea and the real conversation right now is, do we give children puberty blockers, keep them from going through puberty so that this decision they've made at a very young age can almost be permanent, you know, and some people, We'll call it medical castration. Why should a child be making a permanent decision? What do you say to those that are in the community that said,

it saved my life, you know, this is, you know, kids will commit suicide if they're not given this control over their body. How do you respond to that attack really from the community that you had sought to join? I mean, I suppose going by point here, in terms of, you know, pausing this, it's not a neutral act. You are interfering directly in stages of development that once your time to go through those stages of development passes, you really can't get that back. It is not a neutral pause button. And from these studies we do have.

We also know that it is well documented that the vast majority of young children dealing with these issues, if allowed to go through natural purity where their brain matures a little bit and is flooded with the correct hormones and their body starts to develop, they will grow out of these feelings and oftentimes maybe we'll just grow up to be gay. We also know I, you know, I'm aware there are people in the community who say that this saved their life. And, you know, I do kind of have two responses to that is oftentimes these are people who maybe went through it, you know, let's say 10 years ago when the process was very, very different and they did receive pushback on these feelings.

But also, you can say that looking back, but you don't know what would have happened had you been given the chance to grow without that. You know, you don't know if maybe, um, like psychological intervention and waiting would have been the best because it is very easy to look back, you know, and say, this saved my life when, you know, the grass is always greener for you still. Right. And, you know, I also suppose in terms of, you know, children, being given this much autonomy, kids are very, like I mentioned, they are very imaginative. They are very, you know, almost fluid in how they explore the world. And I think cementing a decision a child has at, let's say, like, nine, you know, is really,

you are taking such a gamble with both that child's health and their future. And you are making it on their behalf because you are the adult. That child, you know, regardless of how much they're saying they want something, they cannot understand the long-term impacts of that. And you are taking that gamble. And, you know, it's one of those things where if we look back and we all thought about what we were like when we were nine and imagine having what we wanted at that time cemented into permanent reality, I think we would be living in a very worrying

world if we all did that. And so it should be just as worrying in these cases. Because I mean, a child really doesn't have a concept of what fertility or an actual, like, loving, committed adult relationship is like. They don't have that concept. They're children. They don't really have the capacity to understand that full concept. You know, they don't understand what, you know, early osteoporosis or any of these other side effects truly mean. And I think we live in a very worrying world where we have taken the barriers that are necessary in childhood development for kids to push back on and healthily push against to explore themselves. And instead of, you know, keeping those barriers so kids actually have that room to

explore themselves within the confines that they are still children. Instead, we have taken away those barriers completely and replaced it with a medical industry that can only affirm. It's really brilliantly stated, and I hadn't really thought about that, that it's almost hypocritical in that you're saying let the child explore and then you're locking them into one of the explorations they took. Instead of, if we're going to be open-minded, but let the child explore in and out of their, you know, the worlds that they want to sort of play with his children. It's really, really important, I think. And I just want to thank you so much for taking this time. And I think this is obviously a conversation that we're also very

confused about. And I also want to say that, you know, my heart goes out. It is clear there's a lot of, gender dysphoria or however we discuss it confusion in the space for whatever that's worth I think these are troubling times there's a lot of internet you know even in the fact that the internet sort of is making us all alone we're not interacting as much I mean how much is all of those issues coming into play here but it's been very helpful and I know it's it's not easy to talk about the things you are you are really truly courageous in the in the work that you're doing. And I also want to say to you, you know, we talk to a lot of doctors, and so I'm going to do some research. I even have one coming up here in a minute that I'll talk to, but we're going to try and see if we can't find someone that is a little bit better equipped to handle what you're going through and see if we can't help out, okay? Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, Luca, take care, and I look forward to hearing how your journey continues and wish you all the best. All right, you too.